Medusa Taverna, Sydney restaurant review

Author: Pat Nourse
Photography: Jason Loucas

Hey Greek Australia, why don't you give us more to eat? I can
count the Greek restaurants in Sydney that have impressed me
without having to resort to the other five fingers: Civic Dining,
home to Peter Conistis's sublime feats of pastry-making; and
Perama, Petersham's interestingly experimental and deeply friendly
neighbourhood favourite. On the next tier, Nostos flies the flag
with yemista and barbecued octopus amid the tricolour hordes of
lower Norton Street, you can give your dancing shoes a work-out at
Steki in Newtown, and if you want a whole roast sheep's head served
in a setting that has barely changed since the 1960s, there's
always Marrickville's landmark Corinthian. Another member of the
trapped-in-amber-and-loving-it school, meanwhile, is one of
Sydney's oldest restaurants, the fabulously unreconstructed
Diethnes on Pitt Street. We all know Greece has the goods when it
comes to food, yet they remain, for the modern Australian
restaurant-going Tantalus, cruelly just out of reach. Where are our
budding Theodore Kyriakous, our Michael Psilakises?

When it comes to the sophistication of the food, no one in
Sydney really holds a candle to Conistis, and he has been a
long-time and tireless champion of Greek food's modern-day dining
potential. At the Civic, though, the sense of Greek experience and
hospitality typically goes no further than the plate, a little bit
like one of those smiles that never reaches the eyes. Hospitality
is a long suit at Perama, meanwhile, and whether you're talking
about his pork belly "baklava" or the way he teams shellfish with
crisp slices of spiced soujouk sausage in his Smyrna scallops,
owner-chef David Tsirekas's creative impulses give the menu plenty
of juice. But this ambition and these bright ideas, sadly, can be
brought undone by a lack of clarity and finesse on the plate. Where
Melbourne now has firing-on-all-cylinders Greek fine-dining and
taverna food lifted by quality ingredients and sharp and consistent
cooking, these things are harder to find in Sydney than they really
should be.

Medusa Taverna is for my buck the closest thing we have to a
casual straight Greek diner of note. It's fast without being
brusque, polished without being too pricey. And despite being named
for that arresting sister of Stheno and Euryale, venomous-locked
daughter of Phorcys, it's not too hard on the eyes. Opened in 2007,
it's distinctively Greek without deploying fish-nets or blue neon;
the décor is modern, but not in the look-at-me sense. Tables are
double-clothed, a terrace on one side and a balcony on the other
offering the honk and hiss of Market Street. Floor-to-ceiling
photographs of the Cyclades cover the walls, but otherwise the
Hellenic touches are relatively low-key: the tiles running up the
bar, the writhing snake-like feature lights recessed in the
ceiling, that sort of thing. The blue-and-white pattern that
predominates is not of the Aegean but of the sea of business shirts
cramming every table. Steak and Burgundy may be the CBD's favourite
way to splurge, but on a more day-to-day basis it seems grilled
snapper tail and perky Peloponnese whites have the power of
siren-song.

The menu is relatively straightforward when you compare it with
those of the more progressive Civic and Perama (and indeed The
Press Club), but it's far from cookie-cutter. When the classics are
done here, they're done with respect and skill. Fried eggplant is a
fine example in that it's a dish that just about everyone mucks up.
Here you're served discs about a centimetre thick; they've got a
pale, crisp, light batter coating, and the creaminess of the
eggplant flesh inside suggests that they're either precooked before
they're battered, or that chef Gregori Akridas just happens to be a
dab hand with the deep-fryer. Either way, the flavour is clear and
sweet enough to render the dipping sauce of garlicky thinned
skordalia almost redundant. A special of fried zucchini flowers is
similarly accomplished. The crisp coating isn't exactly tempura in
this instance, but the herby ricotta and rice filling makes for a
fun and very edible play on yemista, the stuffed capsicum and
tomato ballast of many a trad-Greek menu.

Predictably, perhaps, it's these mezedes or entrée dishes that
are the menu's strength, the main courses not quite reaching the
same heights. The grilled lamb pieces in the arni souvlaki are
wonderfully flavoursome, but the chips and salad they're served
with are a bit ordinary. For every slow-baked side of lamb,
fork-tender and seductive of scent, there's a moussaka that,
despite its pretty splayed eggplant-petal garnish, is just that bit
too gluey and heavy to be called really great. There again, the
xifias souvlaki is mercifully a chip-free zone, presenting simply
as skewers of very fresh prawns and hunks of swordfish over
old-school lemon potatoes and parsley, the seafood cooked just so,
retaining all its bounce and tang from the char-grill.

If you want to make an entire meal of mezedes, you're not short
of options. Saganaki makes a virtue of simplicity: sizeable
isosceles sails of mottled golden-brown kefalotiri cheese laid
gooily by some slices of raw tomato, a wedge of lemon and a little
salsa of crushed green olive. A little twist, but an intelligent
one. Kotopoulo podarakia is a new one on me. Described as
caramelised "mini chicken shanks", it's made all the more
interesting by a vigorous application of spice (notably star anise)
contrasted with a honey-sweet sauce and shreds of caramelised
fennel. Then there's the loukanika. These country-style sausages
have often been given short shrift at Greek restaurants in Sydney,
but at Medusa they're redeemed by the chunkiness of their filling,
rich in chilli, coriander seed and other spices. They're given a
good char and served on a nicely sharp salad of beetroot
leaves.

Apart from the central location and the fact that the prices are
thoroughly decent, I'm guessing Medusa's popularity with the
business crowd has a lot to do with the fact that service is fast
enough to make Hermes proud. You can run from the comfort of the
chickpea purée with olive oil and flatbread through to the
dangerously dense Greek coffee in no time flat, but the staff are
so approachable that you're left with a feeling of efficiency
rather than hurry, and you can bet your fisherman's hat there'll be
some vintage Greek dad-humour in there from veteran restaurateur
Peter Koutsopoulos too.
And then there are the loukoumades: it'd be a crime to dub the
version of the classic dessert here "Greek doughnuts". Large, crisp
golden puffs of fried dough scattered with nuts and honey, they're
pretty much a reason to visit the restaurant in themselves. Pair
them with an order of the visino glyko, a cocktail glass holding
scoops of vanilla bean ice-cream sauced with Greek sour cherry
preserve and scattered with slivers of toasted almond, and a glass
of, say, Samos muscat or a St John Commandaria - and you're
laughing.

Medusa owes its appeal not so much to the gifts of fortune such
as those bestowed on Achilles but, somewhat more like Odysseus, to
the more everyday virtues of diligence and integrity. This is
simple food done well at a fair price point, and this is a
restaurant that any Sydney neighbourhood would be the better for
having. In short, they work hard, they get it right and we, the
diners, profit. And that's a formula for the ages.